Tell us quick, President Clinton’s defenders demand. Before you begin screaming about the “Asian money” fund-raising scandal dogging the Democratic party and its White House, tell us “what it all means.” What sinister conspiracy is involved? What precisely was the quid pro quo? And unless you can identify it, they suggest, you should please shut up.
Stumped? Don’t be. To understand this allegedly complicated scandal, it helps to focus on just three stories, each of which is actually rather simple.
1) Yogesh Gandhi and Hogen Fukunaga. Begin with Yogesh Gandhi. He was born “Yogesh Kothari,” but claims to be Mohandas K. Gandhi’s brother’s great- grandson. And he is a very lucky man. As recently as a few months ago, thirteen years after moving to California from his native India, Gandhi was on the skids. He had no assets and no bank account, bill collectors and unpaid former employees were chasing him, he owed back taxes to the state, and he’d lost his driver’s license for ignoring a series of traffic fines. Gandhi was a “pauper,” according to papers filed in his divorce proceeding.
But in his friendships, Gandhi was rich. One such friendship was with Dr. Hogen Fukunaga, the multimillionaire leader of a Japanese religious sect known as Ho no Hana Sanpogyo. Dr. Fukunaga has magical powers. Following diagnostic examination of the shape of their navels, he has managed to cure people of cancer. Even more amazing, he has managed to get his picture taken with the president of the United States.
At a May fund-raising dinner in Washington’s Sheraton Carlton Hotel, Fukunaga and Gandhi awarded Bill Clinton the 1996 “Mahatma Gandhi World Peace Award.” The two friends were present to confer this prize because Gandhi had purchased tickets to the dinner with a mammoth $ 325,000 personal contribution to the Democratic National Committee. And there things stood until October, when the Los Angeles Times first reported Gandhi’s pauperhood. A few weeks later, the DNC grudgingly determined that its $ 325, 000 had probably never truly belonged to Gandhi. So it returned the money — to him. Is this a great country, or what?
2) Charlie Trie and Suma Ching Hai. Several hundred followers of Hue Thi Thanh Wallenstatter must also think it’s a great country. They, too, appear to be wealthier for having had their names attached to someone else’s financial contributions to Bill Clinton.
Wallenstatter is a Vietnamese-born woman whose murky biography includes residence in a number of countries around the world, India and the United States among them. While working in Germany for the Red Cross, Hue Thi Thanh was married to a “scientist” (Herr Wallenstatter, presumably). But that poor fellow was constraining her spiritual development, so they agreed to a separation, and Hue Thi Thanh wound up in Taiwan, where she now prefers to be known as “Suma Ching Hai,” or “Master,” or, simply, “She.”
Master preaches something called the “Quan Yin Method,” which involves ” contemplation of the sound vibration.” Apart from vegetarianism, Master seems to make minimal demands on Her initiates. According to Her World Wide Web home page, “You will not be asked to join any organization, or participate in any way that does not suit your current life style.” But you may want to drink Master’s dirty bath water, which is believed to have special curative properties — and you may want to make a $ 1,000 donation to the Presidential Legal Expense Trust established to help Bill and Hillary Clinton pay attorneys’ fees associated with the Whitewater and Paula Jones matters.
On March 21, 1996, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, a frequent White House visitor and trade-commission appointee — he chummily calls the president “Lao Ke,” or “Old Clinton” — arrived at the offices of Michael Cardozo, executive director of the Presidential Legal Expense Trust. Trie was carrying $ 460,000 in contributions — checks and money orders from ostensibly different sources but with sequential serial numbers and identical handwriting. Cardozo immediately refused $ 70,000 as fraudulent or otherwise obviously “deficient.” But he had the remaining $ 390,000 deposited in a downtown Washington bank. Two weeks later, Cardozo met with Hillary Clinton and deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes at the White House to brief them on Trie’s unusual gift. They urged caution, which seems to have prompted Cardozo to decline a subsequent offering of $ 179,000 from Trie.
But it was not until June 26 that the Trust finally decided it could not accept the original Trie boodle. Investigators hired by Cardozo had by then concluded that Trie’s 409 “donors,” many or most of them followers of Suma Ching Hai, did not have sufficient financial resources to make such contributions. They were probably fronts. The money was probably not really theirs. So Cardozo returned it — to them.
3) Man Ya Shih and the Hsi Lai temple. Now, most of the monks and nuns of Los Angeles’s Hsi Lai Buddhist temple have not yet had “their” political donations refunded, but that can only be a matter of time. Back in April, with party chairman Don Fowler in the audience and Vice President Al Gore in front of the microphone, the temple was host to a DNC fundraiser. A hundred- odd monks and nuns, who take vows of poverty and live on stipends of $ 40 a month, somehow managed to donate a total of $ 140,000. One of the nuns, Man Ya Shih, later told the Wall Street Journal that her own $ 5,000 check was laundered money; a Democratic activist who did not want to be identified had paid her $ 5,000 cash in small bills to write the check.
This nun is currently represented by attorney Peter Kelly, former head of the California Democratic party, and she has changed her story. In submissions to the Federal Election Commission prepared for her by Kelly, Man Ya Shih now insists that the $ 5,000 was her money all along. Her Wall Street Journal admission was a white lie. She was nervous and wanted to get the Journal’s reporter off the phone, you see. So she offered the most innocent explanation she could think of: She told the reporter that she had participated in a felony. Kelly somehow tells this tale with a straight face.
Back to our original question: What does it all mean? Well, all of these questionable transactions, and several questionable others, directly or indirectly involve John Huang, the now-infamous Commerce Department staffer and DNC fund-raiser. By implication, therefore, they involve the billionaire Riady family, owners of Indonesia’s Lippo conglomerate and (several of them) friends of the president. Huang began his career at a Lippo-owned Hong Kong bank now half-owned by Communist China’s trade ministry (and suspected of Beijing-directed commercial intelligence-gathering activity). Huang later became a U.S. citizen working for Lippo in Little Rock. In 1994, he took a $ 900,000 severance payment and became a deputy assistant secretary of commerce, in which position he maintained frequent contact with Lippo representatives, his friend Charlie Trie, and senior White House staffers.
For most of 1996, after leaving the Commerce Department, John Huang raised soft-money donations for the DNC. He solicited Yogesh Gandhi’s contribution. He organized the Hsi Lai temple event. He mysteriously disappeared when reports of his activities first surfaced in the newspapers.
And throughout Huang’s tenure in Washington, the Clinton administration did things that made Lippo people happy. The president sent a get-well note to one of Lippo’s founding investors. The president sent Ron Brown and U.S. businessmen on overseas trade missions to ink deals with Lippo subsidiaries. The president banned mining of a giant clean-coal reserve in Utah, which — an envelope-pushing report by Paul Weyrich’s NET recently pointed out — makes Indonesia’s own reserves of environmentally friendly coal suddenly much more valuable on the world market.
Quid pro quo? We do not know yet. And though we would very much like to know, the truth is it really doesn’t matter. No one need prove a “quo” to justify pursuit of this scandal, because the “quids” are all so patently illegal. It is illegal for a foreign citizen to make U.S. campaign contributions. It is illegal to disguise the source of U.S. campaign contributions. It is illegal to kite checks and engineer postal-service money orders under bogus names. It is illegal, under the tax code, for a house of worship to host a political fund-raiser.
And it is astounding that the Democratic party, in the face of voluminous prima facie evidence of such criminal behavior, continues to reveal its relevant knowledge in misleadingly tiny dribbles — and that the Clinton Justice Department is only now issuing subpoenas in the matter and has yet to call a single witness before a federal grand jury.
Someone’s got to uphold the law. No doubt the incoming Republican 105th Congress would like to avoid the public reputation for partisan nastiness that so besieged the 104th. Beginning the new Congress with splashy scandal hearings probably doesn’t fit into that plan very well at all. But if the administration continues to evade Lippogate scrutiny, it will be Congress’s duty to hold those hearings just the same.
David Tell, for the Editors
